Monday, May 5, 2014
Leasing the Rain, William Finnegan for The New Yorker
In April of 2000, in the central plaza of the beautiful old Andean city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, the body of Víctor Hugo Daza lay on a makeshift bier. Daza, a seventeen-year-old student, had been shot in the face by the Army during protests sparked by an increase in local water rates. These protests had been growing for months, and unrest had also erupted in other parts of the country. The national government had just declared martial law. In Cochabamba, a city of eight hundred thousand, the third largest in Bolivia, a good part of the population was now in the streets, battling police and soldiers in what people had started calling la guerra del agua—the Water War. Peasants from the nearby countryside manned barricades, sealing off all roads to the city. The protesters had captured the central plaza, where thousands milled around a tiled fountain and the catafalque of Víctor Daza. Some of their leaders had been arrested and taken to a remote prison in the Amazon; others were in hiding.
The chief demand of the water warriors, as they were called, was the removal of a private, foreign-led consortium that had taken over Cochabamba’s water system. For the Bolivian government, breaking with the consortium—which was dominated by the United States-based Bechtel Corporation—was unthinkable, politically and financially. Bolivia had signed a lucrative, long-term contract. Renouncing it would be a blow to the confidence of foreign investors in a region where national governments and economies depend on such confidence for their survival. (Argentina’s recent bankruptcy was caused in large part by a loss of credibility with international bankers.) The rebellion in Cochabamba was setting off loud alarms, particularly among the major corporations in the global water business. This business has been booming in recent years—Enron was a big player, before its collapse—largely because of the worldwide drive to privatize public utilities.
For opponents of privatization, who believe that access to clean water is a human right, the Cochabamba Water War became an event of surpassing interest. There are many signs that other poor communities, especially in Third World cities, may start refusing to accept deals that put a foreign corporation’s hand on the neighborhood pump or the household tap. Indeed, water auctions may turn out to test the limits of the global privatization gold rush. And while the number of populists opposing water privatization seems effectively inexhaustible—the leaders of the Cochabamba rebellion included peasant farmers and an unassuming former shoemaker named Óscar Olivera—the same cannot be said of the world’s water supply. There was a great deal more than local water rates riding on the outcome of this strange, passionate clash in Bolivia.
The world is running out of fresh water. There’s water everywhere, of course, but less than three per cent of it is fresh, and most of that is locked up in polar ice caps and glaciers, unrecoverable for practical purposes. Lakes, rivers, marshes, aquifers, and atmospheric vapor make up less than one per cent of the earth’s total water, and people are already using more than half of the accessible runoff. Water demand, on the other hand, has been growing rapidly—it tripled worldwide between 1950 and 1990—and water use in many areas already exceeds nature’s ability to recharge supplies. By 2025, the demand for water around the world is expected to exceed supply by fifty-six per cent.
Some of the resource depletion is visible from outer space. The Aral Sea, in central Asia, was until recently the world’s fourth-largest lake. Then Soviet planners dammed and diverted its source waters for cotton irrigation. The Aral has since lost half its area and three-fourths of its volume. Its once great fisheries have vanished; all twenty-four species native to the lake are believed to be extinct. The local climate has changed, and dust storms now plague the region.
Aquifer depletion, though less visible, is an even more serious problem. There is sixty times as much fresh water stored underground as in lakes and rivers aboveground. And yet parts of northern China, to take one example, are approaching groundwater bankruptcy. Beijing’s water table has dropped more than a hundred feet in the past forty years. In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer, which reaches from Texas to South Dakota and is indispensable to farming on the Great Plains, is being drained eight times faster than it can naturally recharge. In vast areas of India, Mexico, the Middle East, and California’s Central Valley the story is the same.
Meanwhile, more than a billion people have no access to clean drinking water, and nearly three billion live without basic sanitation. Five million people die each year from waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. This enormous, slow-motion public-health emergency is, in large measure, a result of rapid, chaotic urbanization in the nations of the Global South. Traditional water sources have been polluted, destroyed, overtaxed, or abandoned.
Annual rainfall is not always a measure of water wealth. Poland, for instance, gets plenty of rain, but its lakes, rivers, and groundwater are so polluted that it has as little usable water as Bahrain. Arid regions with the means to pay (Southern California, the Persian Gulf States) already pipe water in from wetter areas. New technologies are being hurriedly developed: huge fabric bags holding millions of gallons of fresh water are being hauled by barges across the Mediterranean, and there are businessmen in Alaska who believe that the state’s earnings from fresh water will eventually dwarf its earnings from oil.
For strategic planners at some of the world’s largest corporations, the global freshwater shortage coincides opportunely with privatization. According to Johan Bastin, of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, “Water is the last infrastructure frontier for private investors.” In the past fifteen years, municipal and regional water systems have been steadily coming onto the international market. Two French corporations, Vivendi Environment and Suez, lead the industry: Vivendi runs eight thousand systems in a hundred countries; Suez has operations in a hundred and thirty countries. The biggest American player, Bechtel, whose directors include former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, has always been notable for its political connections. The United States is itself a field for direct foreign investment in water. Suez is running Atlanta’s water system, and Vivendi recently bought U.S. Filter, a national water-services group, for more than six billion dollars.
But the main push is in the Global South, where, over the past twenty years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have effectively taken control of the economies of scores of nations that are heavily in debt. The Bank and the I.M.F. have been requiring these countries to accept “structural adjustment,” which includes opening markets to foreign firms and privatizing state enterprises, including utilities. The Bank once had a quite different approach to public works: it was an enthusiastic financier of monumental projects, and would typically lend the money to build large dams. Many of the dams were spectacular failures, delivering few, if any, benefits (except to politicians and construction firms) while displacing millions of people and leaving behind environmental destruction and public debts. The Bank is now getting out of the dam business and into water privatization. It often works closely with the conglomerates, helping them to acquire the water assets of debtor nations.
The idea behind privatization is to bring market discipline and efficiency to bear on a crucial and frequently corrupt sector. Supporters argue that only private capital—which means, in practice, multinational corporations—can afford to expand water and sanitation networks sufficiently to reach the underserved poor. Since corporations are in business to make money, they often increase water rates. But, in theory, higher water rates can also help to promote conservation. Indeed, privatization advocates say, any valuable commodity—and this includes health care and education—that is provided free eventually gets taken for granted and wasted. According to this argument, turning water into a tradable commodity may even be the only practical way to avoid worldwide shortages and environmental disasters. Public subsidies for essential services such as water may sound like humane policy, but in the real world subsidies benefit the powerful, because they have the resources to manipulate them.
In Cochabamba, which has a chronic water shortage, this unintended consequence was grotesquely clear. Most of the poorest neighborhoods were not hooked up to the network, so state subsidies to the water utility went mainly to industries and middle-class neighborhoods; the poor paid far more for water of dubious purity from trucks and handcarts. In the World Bank’s view, it was a city that was crying out for water privatization.
I went to Villa San Miguel, a ramshackle settlement on an arid hillside a couple of miles south of Cochabamba, to find out how the global water business looks from the ground. My guide was a student named Fredy Villagomez, who grew up in Villa San Miguel and helped organize an independent water coöperative for the barrio. The coöperative is one of dozens that have been formed in recent years, in part with international aid. We rode out of the old city in a clattering taxi, down a road jammed with trucks, buses, minivans, donkeys, and pedestrians. It was a hot, clear afternoon; Mt. Tunari, a seventeen-thousand-foot peak, glittered in the northwest. Cochabamba sits in a wide, fertile valley at eight thousand feet—only a middling elevation in Bolivia, where the capital, La Paz, is at twelve thousand feet. To the east, beyond the mountains, lies the Amazon rain forest. Cochabamba is more than four hundred years old, but a recent influx of migrants from the countryside has caused its population to quadruple since 1976. Today, Cochabamba is ringed by dozens of barrios marginales—dusty, impoverished settlements that have sprung up to house the newcomers. Basic services—electricity, transportation, sanitation, water—are catch-as-catch-can in thebarrios marginales.
”We started digging our well in 1994,” Villagomez told me. Stocky, soft-spoken, with Indian features and thick eyeglasses, he was leading me down a rocky path to a small cinder-block pump house. “The planning took years. It was an expensive project, and a lot of work. All the residents helped, and we finished in 1997.” The coöperative received technical assistance from Danish aid workers; there is a dirt road in the barrio—the Avenida Dinamarca—named for them. Villagomez urged me to peer into the dim pump house, which contained a single electric pump. “The well is a hundred and twelve metres deep,” he said.
I thought that sounded awfully deep. Villagomez agreed. “Before, the water under this valley was at only twenty metres.”
The well made a major difference to Villa San Miguel. Clean water was suddenly plentiful and relatively cheap—households paid the water coöperative between two and five dollars a month to cover the costs of running the pump and maintaining the system. “It gives water to two hundred and ten families,” Villagomez said. “We felt a lot of pride in this achievement.”
Then, in 1999, the Bolivian government conducted an auction of the Cochabamba water system as part of its privatization program. The auction drew only one bidder: a consortium called Aguas del Tunari. The controlling partner in the consortium was International Water, a British engineering firm that was then wholly owned by Bechtel. (An Italian company later bought a half interest.) But the government, unfazed by its own weak bargaining position, decided to proceed.
The terms of the two-and-a-half-billion-dollar, forty-year deal reflected the lack of competition for the contract. Aguas del Tunari would take over the municipal water network and all the smaller systems—industrial, agricultural, and residential—in the metropolitan area, and would have exclusive rights to all the water in the district, even in the aquifer. The contract guaranteed the company a minimum fifteen-per-cent annual return on its investment, which would be adjusted annually to the consumer price index in the United States. On coöperative wells such as Villa San Miguel’s—which the government hadn’t even helped build—the new water company could install meters and begin charging for water. Residents would also be charged for the installation of the meters. These expropriations were legal under a new water law that had been rushed through the Bolivian parliament.
The first Cochabambinos to question the terms of the water privatization were not the small water coöperatives that faced expropriation and crushing bills but local professionals—mainly engineers and environmentalists—and a federation of peasant farmers who rely on irrigation. They began calling public meetings to air their concerns. The government ignored them. At a contract-signing ceremony, the President of Bolivia and the mayor of Cochabamba drank champagne with consortium executives. The news of impending expropriations and rumors of big water-price hikes began to circulate. The list of alarmed groups—neighborhood associations, water coöperatives, the labor unions—grew. There were street protests, and a broad coalition emerged, called the Coördinator for the Defense of Water and Life, or simply La Coordinadora, led by Óscar Olivera.
Olivera, who is forty-six, at first seems an unlikely leader. He wears a black leather-billed cap, which makes him look like a gentle, would-be street hood from the Beat era. He is small and sad-faced, and he often looks downward, inward—as if he were thinking extremely hard about something unpleasant. It’s an especially striking manner in Bolivia, where virtually everyone presents a placid, reserved face to the world. Olivera’s grandfather worked in Bolivia’s huge tin mines; his father went to work as a carpenter when he was a child. Olivera started out as a machinist in a shoe factory, then went on to work for the factory’s union. He is now the head of a confederation of factory workers’ unions. Oddly, his air of distraction doesn’t seem to unsettle anyone around him. Working people volubly engage him wherever he goes, calling him Oscarito.
”Compañeros,” Olivera would tell crowds. “It’s become a fight between David and Goliath, between poor people and a multinational corporation. They have a lot of money, and they want to take away our water.”
The World Bank warmly calls Bolivia an “early adjuster.” Other poor, indebted countries have had to be forced to accept structural adjustment, but in Bolivia the World Bank and the I.M.F. have enjoyed a deep understanding with successive governments since 1985. Public enterprises—the railways, the telephone system, the national airlines, the great tin mines of Oruro and Potosí—have been sold, mainly to foreign investors. (This fire sale goes on: a Bolivian government Web site lists dozens of factories, refineries, cement plants, paper mills, and municipal utilities that are still available.)
The tin mines, as it happens, had been nationalized after a popular revolution in 1952, which also destroyed the semi-feudal hacienda system that had been in place in Bolivia for centuries. The United States played an unlikely role in that revolution. The Eisenhower Administration, already busy undermining left-wing governments in Guatemala and Guyana, accepted the new government’s plea that it was not Communist (even if some of its allies were) while demanding, and getting, a new investment code that permitted American companies to start operating in Bolivia’s eastern oil fields. The United States increased food aid to help the new government survive, and saw to it that “state capitalism” became the official economic model.
An Army coup overthrew the elected government in 1964, leading to the first in a long string of military regimes. (Many of the officers involved had received “counter-insurgency” training in the United States.) They were not, except during a period in the late nineteen-seventies, as violent as those in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. The unions and the left were repressed, but not so severely as to engender a guerrilla movement. By 1982, however, when civilian rule was finally restored, the Bolivian economy, plundered by the generals, was in ruins, and hyperinflation soon took hold, hitting an annual rate of twenty-five thousand per cent in 1985.
Enter “the Boys,” also known as “the Chicago Boys,” after a group of economists, educated at the University of Chicago, who implemented free-market policies (known in Latin America as neoliberalism) in Pinochet’s Chile. In Bolivia they were led by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a wealthy mine owner who was then Minister of Planning (he was later President). Sánchez worked closely with Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard economist who became famous for the “shock therapy” he designed for post-Communist Poland.
Bolivia’s shock treatment was ferocious. The currency was devalued, all price and wage controls were abolished, government spending was cut, and the state-owned tin mines were effectively closed. The economy went into instant recession; unemployment soared. The inflationary spiral, however, was broken, and good relations between the government and the I.M.F. were restored, initiating a new flow of foreign investment and loans.
And for the past sixteen years Bolivia has dutifully followed the dictates of the World Bank and the I.M.F. Most of its people, however, have nothing to show for it. Poverty was never significantly reduced. This is not unusual in Latin America, where the poverty rate is higher today than it was in 1980—after a full generation of nominal democracy and ever-increasing free trade. But Bolivia, like Argentina, really put on what Thomas L. Friedman, the Times columnist, calls “the golden straitjacket” of liberalized economic policies. The predicted foreign investment materialized, but the prosperity did not. Landlocked, with a population of eight million and a wretched infrastructure, Bolivia remains the poorest country in South America.
Hugo Banzer, who was Bolivia’s military dictator in the nineteen-seventies, became President again after the last election, before stepping down last August in favor of his Vice-President, Jorge Quiroga, because of illness. Quiroga now sits at the head of a “megacoalition.” The political class in Bolivia has always been small, rich, and overwhelmingly white, but rarely have the major parties, all business-aligned, shared a ruling philosophy so peaceably as in recent years. The consensus was that nothing and no one should be exempt from the discipline of the market. Then Bechtel came to Cochabamba and, as the local peasants put it, tried to “lease the rain.”
When the first monthly bills from Aguas del Tunari arrived, in January, 2000, stunned business owners and middle-class householders began to join the Coordinadora’s protests. Some bills had doubled, and ordinary workers now had water bills that amounted to a quarter of their monthly income.
Aguas del Tunari seemed to have given little thought to how its plans would be received in Cochabamba. The International Water executives who were actually doing the work in the city were engineers, not marketers, and, being newly arrived from abroad, they were not attuned to the problems or passions of the Bolivian public. Geoffrey Thorpe, the company’s manager, simply said that if people didn’t pay their water bills their water would be turned off.
In truth, the price hikes were not as arbitrary as they seemed. The consortium had agreed, in its contract, to expand the city’s water system. This was going to be expensive, as was the large-scale repair job required by the deterioration of the existing system. “We were confident that we could implement this program in a shorter period of time than the one required by the contract,” Didier Quint, the managing director of International Water, said. He added, however, “We had to reflect in the tariff increase all the increases that had never been implemented before.” The consortium had also agreed to finish a stalled dam project known as Misicuni, which would pipe water through the mountains. This aspect of the deal seemed to make little sense—the World Bank had commissioned studies that pronounced Misicuni uneconomic. But the dam project had less to do with how privatization works in theory than with the reality of how multinational corporations must come to terms with local politics.
Plans for the Misicuni Dam have been around for decades. The mayor of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa, had campaigned hard to complete it and was undeterred by questions about whether it was worth building. Reyes Villa was a popular mayor. People liked to say that his good looks got him the women’s vote—he is better known by the nickname Bombón (Sweetie)—but his political instincts are sharp. Despite the widespread poverty in his city, he had pulled off major vanity projects, including a gargantuan white statue of Christ on a hilltop. (This Cristo de la Concordia is supposedly six feet taller than its rival in Rio de Janeiro.) Reyes Villa had been a real-estate developer before he became mayor, and everyone in Cochabamba was quick to note the proximity of most new roads and parks to Bombón’s properties. His political party, the New Republican Force, was a personal vehicle as well as a formidable municipal patronage machine, and people said that N.F.R., its Spanish abbreviation, stood for “Nueva Forma de Robar” (“New Form of Robbery”). Reyes Villa lived in conspicuous splendor, and when I visited, soldiers were guarding his estate. There was a wall-size oil painting of his family. “Poverty is growing here, with wealth being concentrated in very few hands,” he told me earnestly while we sat in his mansion. Still, Bombón won elections, his party was in President Banzer’s megacoalition, and he had national ambitions. More to the point, some of his main financial backers stood to profit fabulously from the Misicuni Dam’s construction. When the central government first tried to lease Cochabamba’s water system to foreign bidders, in 1997, and did not include Misicuni in the tender, Bombón stopped it cold. It was only the inclusion of the project in the Aguas del Tunari contract that got the Mayor on board.
The Water War began in earnest in February, 2000. “The people went to the plaza to demonstrate against the contract,” Fredy Villagomez told me. “The young men were in the city center, trying to hold the plaza. Others were here, maintaining a barricade across the highway. The women were cooking for those on the barricade. There were many campesinos passing by, walking to Cochabamba to join the rebellion.” Crowds of regantes—peasant irrigators—arrived in the city, marching under village banners, or wiphala. The women, cholitas, wore fine straw hats and shimmering pleated velvet dresses, and their black hair was braided in long pigtails woven together in back with bright ribbons.
Most of the troops that Óscar Olivera could personally call out for demonstrations were jubilados—retired factory workers, old union men shuffling under battered fedoras, like faded figures on a postcard from some antipodal workers’ state of another era. For a great many Bolivians, the labor unions retain an association with a time when workers were organized and proud, and when Bolivia’s railroads and airlines and mines belonged to Bolivians. It made symbolic sense, then, that Olivera, the leader of the Cochabamba rebellion, was a union man, even though only a minority of Cochabamba’s factory workers are still union members. (In the union confederation’s dingy offices on the corner of Cochabamba’s central plaza, soccer trophies fill the shelves, but when I asked about them the receptionist explained that the unions could no longer field a team.)
The growing crowds of Coordinadora supporters were drawn instead from the informal sector of pieceworkers, sweatshop employees, and street venders that has expanded enormously since the advent of structural adjustment and the closing of the tin mines. These men and women, most of them young, had more flexible schedules than workers in regular factories. Students from the University of Cochabamba, some of them middle-class anarchists, also joined in, carrying banners denouncing the World Bank, the I.M.F., and neoliberalism. But the front-line troops, particularly after the conflict sharpened and the authorities began to fire live bullets, proved to be the city’s street children—an adolescent army of the homeless which has been growing in recent years.
The government’s response escalated steadily. After the first protests, a ministerial delegation was sent to Cochabamba. By the end of the month, the water-price hikes had been rolled back, but the protests continued. Then the government sent in troops from Oruro and La Paz. Nearly two hundred protesters were arrested, and seventy civilians and fifty-one policemen were wounded. The Catholic archbishop of Cochabamba tried to mediate. In March, the Coordinadora held an unofficial referendum, counted nearly fifty thousand votes, and announced that ninety-six per cent favored the cancellation of the contract with Aguas del Tunari. “There is nothing to negotiate,” the government replied.
In April, protesters again occupied Cochabamba’s central plaza, and when the Coordinadora’s leaders, including Óscar Olivera, arrived at the governor’s office for a meeting they were arrested. After they were released the following day, some went into hiding. Then more leaders were arrested, and some were taken to a jungle prison in the Amazon. The house of Óscar Olivera’s parents was searched four times.
Protests had begun to break out in other parts of the country—in La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí, and in many rural communities—and national peasant organizations held demonstrations. By this point, most of the country’s major highways were blocked.
Bolivia’s rulers have always harbored a deep fear that the country’s Indian majority might one day rise up and kill them in their beds—or, more realistically, trap them in their cities. In 1781, an Indian rebel army, having killed all the Spaniards in a regional capital, laid siege to La Paz for several months. The rebellion was ultimately defeated by troops brought from Buenos Aires, but white Bolivia’s fear of a horizon suddenly filling with angry Indians has never fully dissipated, and on April 8, 2000, the Banzer government declared a national state of siege. This meant martial law, and it allowed for mass arrests. The minister who announced the decree also said—in a remark that Bechtel’s spokesman in London quickly picked up—that the uprising in Cochabamba was being financed by narcotraficantes.
The state of siege, along with the comments about drug traffickers, backfired in Cochabamba. The small coca-leaf farmers, known as cocaleros, from the lowlands east of Cochabamba, had indeed joined the protesters, but ordinary Bolivians draw a sharp distinction between cocaleros and the wealthy, Army-bribing, customs-bribing narcotraficantes. Many of the cocaleros are ex-miners. Water is not their issue—they are more concerned about a coca-eradication program sponsored by the United States—but their natural sympathy was with the protesters. And the cholitas in their velvet dresses, and the jubilados marching in their rumpled fedoras, and the water warriors in their bandannas did not appreciate the suggestion that they were insincere.
The day the state of siege was declared, the main plaza in Cochabamba was filled with people. The Army fired tear gas into the narrow streets of the old city, where protesters had built barricades. Demonstrators blocked all roads into the city; the government cut off power to local radio and television stations. Middle-class matrons took wounded protesters into their homes and beauty salons to nurse them, and bowls of vinegar mixed with water and baking powder—useful for soaking bandannas for protection from tear gas—appeared outside a thousand respectable doorways.
Then, from behind a line of military police, a sharpshooter in civilian clothes fired a rifle into a crowd of unarmed civilians. He was caught on video by a Bolivian television crew, and was later identified as Robinson Iriarte de la Fuente, a Bolivian Army captain who had been trained in the United States. Víctor Hugo Daza, the seventeen-year-old student, who was on his way home from a part-time job, was, according to eyewitnesses, among the crowd that Iriarte fired into. He was hit in the face and died instantly. Dozens of other people were treated for bullet wounds. By the time Daza had been raised onto his bier and the police and the Army had been repeatedly prevented from seizing his body, there was clearly no future for Aguas del Tunari in Cochabamba.
The company’s executives were told that the police could no longer guarantee their safety, and fled Cochabamba for the lowland city of Santa Cruz. They may have noted that, several weeks earlier, Mayor Reyes Villa had left their side. When the people took to the streets en masse, Bombón had assessed their mood and stepped away from Aguas del Tunari so fast that it was as if he had never seen these foreigners before. He was not the only one trying to distance himself; when water privatization collapsed in Cochabamba, the World Bank’s representatives insisted that the fiasco had nothing to do with them. The government informed Aguas del Tunari that, because the company had “abandoned” its concession, its contract was revoked. (The company argued that it had not left voluntarily but had been pushed out.) The day after Víctor Hugo Daza’s funeral, Óscar Olivera announced the consortium’s departure to thousands of exhausted, disbelieving demonstrators from the balcony of his union’s offices above the plaza.
The Coordinadora had swept the field so completely that a new national water law was immediately passed—”written from below,” as the water-rights campaigners say. Banged together by parliamentarians and water specialists from the Coordinadora who gathered in La Paz, the new law gave legal recognition to usos y costumbres—traditional communal practices—by protecting small independent water systems, guaranteeing public consultation on rates, and giving social needs priority over financial goals. This triumph seemed to the water warriors too good to be true, and it was. Laws in Bolivia are implemented—if, indeed, they are ever implemented—only after bylaws have been attached and approved, and the government soon made it clear that, in the case of the new water law, this process could take years.
After the Bechtel consortium’s exit, the management of Cochabamba’s water was returned to the old public utility known as semapa, which was thoroughly overhauled. The new board of directors included Coordinadora representatives, who vowed to treat water as a “social good” and not as an ordinary commodity. But so far the fervently envisioned transformation of Cochabamba’s water system has been fitful at best. Service is still poor. Even within the existing network, many neighborhoods have service only occasionally, and the valley’s aquifer continues to sink. Corruption has reportedly been reduced, but an intolerable situation persists: the poor in Cochabamba, those who are not on the network and who have no well, pay ten times as much for their water as the relatively wealthy residents who are hooked up. The new semapa, having driven away international capitalists, desperately needs new capital. Since simply raising water rates across the board is politically impossible, that means new partners or new loans.
The Bolivian government has little interest in seeing the new semapa succeed. Neither is it likely to get much help from the World Bank. In recent years, the Bank has been widely accused of not fulfilling (or even seriously pursuing) its self-proclaimed mission of fighting poverty, and, in response, has changed its description of its mandate, emphasizing “empowerment” and “pro-poor coalitions” over fiscal discipline. What its officials do when confronted by an actual pro-poor coalition is, of course, another matter. In Bolivia, its representatives have never met with the leaders of the Coordinadora.
The Coordinadora’s leadership knows that an old-fashioned state-centered solution to Cochabamba’s water crisis would be unsatisfactory. The new semapahas not won the hearts of many in Cochabamba—it is, after all, still the water company. But, its supporters point out, at least it is Bolivian.
”The tragedy is that the solution to Cochabamba’s water problem has been pushed off for at least another five years,” Michael Curtin, a Washington-based executive who became president of Aguas del Tunari after its removal from Cochabamba, told me. Curtin had been involved in the deal as a consultant for International Water, and represents the interests of Bechtel and its partners in talks with the Bolivian government. In November, 2001, after negotiations had deadlocked, the consortium filed a complaint against the Bolivian government in a World Bank trade court in Washington. The complainant was Aguas del Tunari, but the political weight was supplied by Bechtel. The company’s claim is being made under a bilateral investment treaty between Bolivia and, of all places, the Netherlands. It seems that International Water, which was originally registered in the Cayman Islands (which has no comparable investment treaty with Bolivia), moved its registration to Amsterdam soon after the Cochabamba contract was signed. Bechtel and its partners are demanding at least twenty-five million dollars in compensation for the broken contract. While trade-court proceedings are notoriously slow, nobody seems to believe that the Bolivians can afford that kind of money.
Still, the prospect of one more financial burden is the least of the government’s worries in connection with what people in Bolivia refer to as the Bechtel case. The truly frightening part is the impact that the Water War has had on the foreign-investment climate. “Right now the situation is ‘You can’t trust Bolivia,’ “ Curtin said. The United States Embassy agrees. “It was a pretty significant blow,” an Embassy official told me. A subsequent auction to sell the La Paz telephone company drew no bidders at all. The United States has not yet decided, the official added, whether to formally designate the breaking of the contract in Cochabamba an expropriation. That will depend on the settlement, if there is one, that is reached in the case. Having the United States label the episode an expropriation would be a blow to Bolivia’s hope of seeing any new foreign investment in the near future.
And yet Jorge Quiroga, Bolivia’s new President, is bullish on his country’s prospects. Quiroga, who is forty-one, is tall and fair. He graduated in 1981 from the University of Texas, where he studied industrial engineering, and worked for I.B.M. in Austin as a self-described “corporate yuppie” before moving back to Bolivia with his American wife, Virginia. “We will be the vital heart of South America,” Quiroga predicted repeatedly when I visited him in his ornate, republican-era office in La Paz. Gas exports will lead the way. A long-awaited transcontinental highway connecting Brazil and Chile will pass through Cochabamba. Fibre-optic cables will be laid. One of the biggest things delaying Bolivia’s economic progress? The hypocrisy of the United States and Europe on free trade. “Bolivia is the most open economy in Latin America,” Quiroga said. Meanwhile, American and European farm subsidies, along with tariffs on textiles and agricultural products, make it impossible for Bolivia to sell its exports in the Global North. “They tell us to be competitive while tying our arms behind our backs.”
When I asked him about the Water War, he looked uncomfortable. “A lot of things certainly could have been different along the way, from a lot of different actors,” he said. But, like Michael Curtin, he was certain of one point: “The net effect is that we have a city today with no resolution to the water problem.” In the end, he said, it will be “necessary to bring in private investment to develop the water.”
Quiroga insists that the World Bank and the I.M.F. are not running Bolivia. If it sometimes looks as if they are, that is because technocrats in the government (he has been one) use what he calls “the I.M.F. blackmail” on politicians—warning them that loans will stop if hard fiscal choices are not made, and thus giving them some cover, when in truth there have been no direct threats from the Bank or the I.M.F.
The World Bank now requires all its client governments to submit a “poverty-reduction strategy,” and Quiroga gave me a sketch of Bolivia’s. He had recently been to a meeting of the World Economic Forum—he goes almost every year—and his remarks struck me as having an up-to-the-minute cosmopolitan gloss. The Bolivian state has “socialized” its spending away from production toward education and health, he said, because that’s the one sure route to real development. Quiroga sighed. “But we’ll still be talking about poverty reduction twenty-five years from now, when one of my daughters is sitting here being interviewed.”
Some things, certainly, never change. Last month, Captain Robinson Iriarte was acquitted of all responsibility for the death of young Víctor Hugo Daza. The case had been transferred from the civilian criminal-justice system—no judge was willing to hear it—to a military tribunal, which has final jurisdiction over the cases it hears. Upon his acquittal, Iriarte was promoted to the rank of major.
Claudia Vargas, a lawyer in La Paz who worked for Bolivia’s fledgling utility-regulation body, travelled often to Cochabamba. The leaders of the new semapa, she told me, were unnecessarily preoccupied with the idea that the central government was going to make another attempt to privatize the city’s water. “I tell them, ‘Don’t worry. Nobody is going to try that again for a long time.’ Really, they have a lot of problems in Cochabamba now, and that is not one of them.”
Vargas is young and chic, and she had recently finished a postgraduate course in development administration in thoroughly deregulated Britain. She nonetheless has an unfashionable enthusiasm for regulation. It’s still poorly understood in Bolivia, she thinks, and it got a very bad name in Cochabamba when her boss (now retired) appeared to shill both for the government and for Bechtel’s consortium, which he was supposed to regulate. Vargas was appalled both by the Aguas del Tunari contract and by the consortium’s performance. She thinks that the members of the Coordinadora “are still the good guys in the film,” but that some of them are, at best, misguided. “In the name of usos y costumbres, a lot of terrible things are done.” Water-truck operators, for instance, “drill polluted water and sell it. They waste a lot of water. But the world is changing. Within five years, they will be charged for water—and they will be regulated.”
Trying to find a path outside the binary of state or market control, the Coordinadora has no model. Its leaders vow to treat water as a “human right,” and yet they know it cannot be provided free. They also know that their water company—and Bolivia generally—cannot survive without foreign investment. Meanwhile, Manfred Reyes Villa has started making his move to regain control ofsemapa. In elections to be held soon, his party will run candidates for all the seats on the water company’s board that are now occupied by the Coordinadora. Their campaigns will be far more extravagant and crowd-pleasing than anything Óscar Olivera and his colleagues are likely to stage. Bombón knows his constituency. He has also announced his candidacy for President.
The juggernaut of water privatization has hardly slowed. Bechtel, through International Water, has closed two major water deals in the past year, winning a thirty-year concession for the port city of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, and a controlling stake in the water company of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Many water privatizations seem likely to deliver eventually on their backers’ promises of improved service. In Chile, fierce opposition to concessions has been overcome in several cities by innovative price structures, including water vouchers, that assure poor residents of an adequate supply of clean water.
At the same time, water privatizations have been backfiring all over Latin America. In Panama, popular anger about an attempted privatization helped cost the President his bid for reëlection. Vivendi, the French multinational, had its thirty-year water contract with the Argentine province of Tucumán terminated after two years because of alleged poor performance. Major water privatizations in Lima and Rio de Janeiro have had to be cancelled because of popular opposition. Trinidad recently allowed a management contract with a British water giant to expire. Protests against water privatization have also erupted in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Poland, and Hungary.
One large-scale Bolivian water privatization that the World Bank still points to with pride took place a few years ago in La Paz. The concession was awarded to Suez, which honored its commitment to expand the La Paz water network to several poor neighborhoods just outside the city. This area, known as El Alto, is home to nearly three quarters of a million people, virtually all of them Indians recently arrived from the countryside. But a problem emerged. It seemed that the people in El Alto weren’t using enough water. Accustomed to Andean peasant life, they were extremely careful with water, never wasting a drop, and they continued to be so even after they had taps installed in their homes. This was good conservation, but it was bad for Suez’s bottom line, and the corporation was disappointed in the return on its investment. After it appeared to raise its rates, which were pegged to the dollar, when the local currency was devalued the general happiness with the contract evaporated and residents began to complain about the service. When I was in La Paz, the people of El Alto were marching against Suez. When I asked a World Bank official about the situation, she agreed that there was a basic problem: those Indians needed to learn to use more water. ♦
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Narco Cultura
You can watch the complete film on Netflix (streaming). WARNING! There is a lot of graphic violence in this film. Viewer discretion is advised.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Friday, April 18, 2014
LAS PALABRAS CON QUE Gabrial GARCIA MARQUEZ ACEPTO EL NOBEL en 1982
Antonio Pigafetta, un navegante florentino que acompañó a Magallanes en el primer viaje alrededor del mundo, escribió a su paso por nuestra América meridional una crónica rigurosa que sin embargo parece una aventura de la imaginación. Contó que había visto cerdos con el ombligo en el lomo, y unos pájaros sin patas cuyas hembras empollaban en las espaldas del macho, y otros como alcatraces sin lengua cuyos picos parecían una cuchara. Contó que había visto un engendro animal con cabeza y orejas de mula, cuerpo de camello, patas de ciervo y relincho de caballo. Contó que al primer nativo que encontraron en la Patagonia le pusieron enfrente un espejo, y que aquel gigante enardecido perdió el uso de la razón por el pavor de su propia imagen.
Este libro breve y fascinante, en el cual ya se vislumbran los gérmenes de nuestras novelas de hoy, no es ni mucho menos el testimonios más asombroso de nuestra realidad de aquellos tiempos. Los Cronistas de Indias nos legaron otros incontables. Eldorado, nuestro país ilusorio tan codiciado, figuró en mapas numerosos durante largos años, cambiando de lugar y de forma según la fantasía de los cartógrafos. En busca de la fuente de la Eterna Juventud, el mítico Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca exploró durante ocho años el norte de México, en una expedición venática cuyos miembros se comieron unos a otros y sólo llegaron cinco de los 600 que la emprendieron. Uno de los tantos misterios que nunca fueron descifrados, es el de las once mil mulas cargadas con cien libras de oro cada una, que un día salieron del Cuzco para pagar el rescate de Atahualpa y nunca llegaron a su destino. Más tarde, durante la colonia, se vendían en Cartagena de Indias unas gallinas criadas en tierras de aluvión, en cuyas mollejas se encontraban piedrecitas de oro. Este delirio áureo de nuestros fundadores nos persiguió hasta hace poco tiempo. Apenas en el siglo pasado la misión alemana de estudiar la construcción de un ferrocarril interoceánico en el istmo de Panamá, concluyó que el proyecto era viable con la condición de que los rieles no se hicieran de hierro, que era un metal escaso en la región, sino que se hicieran de oro.
La independencia del dominio español no nos puso a salvo de la demencia. El general Antonio López de Santana, que fue tres veces dictador de México, hizo enterrar con funerales magníficos la pierna derecha que había perdido en la llamada Guerra de los Pasteles. El general García Moreno gobernó al Ecuador durante 16 años como un monarca absoluto, y su cadáver fue velado con su uniforme de gala y su coraza de condecoraciones sentado en la silla presidencial. El general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, el déspota teósofo de El Salvador que hizo exterminar en una matanza bárbara a 30 mil campesinos, había inventado un péndulo para averiguar si los alimentos estaban envenenados, e hizo cubrir con papel rojo el alumbrado público para combatir una epidemia de escarlatina. El monumento al general Francisco Morazán, erigido en la plaza mayor de Tegucigalpa, es en realidad una estatua del mariscal Ney comprada en París en un depósito de esculturas usadas.
Hace once años, uno de los poetas insignes de nuestro tiempo, el chileno Pablo Neruda, iluminó este ámbito con su palabra. En las buenas conciencias de Europa, y a veces también en las malas, han irrumpido desde entonces con más ímpetus que nunca las noticias fantasmales de la América Latina, esa patria inmensa de hombres alucinados y mujeres históricas, cuya terquedad sin fin se confunde con la leyenda. No hemos tenido un instante de sosiego. Un presidente prometeico atrincherado en su palacio en llamas murió peleando solo contra todo un ejército, y dos desastres aéreos sospechosos y nunca esclarecidos segaron la vida de otro de corazón generoso, y la de un militar demócrata que había restaurado la dignidad de su pueblo. En este lapso ha habido 5 guerras y 17 golpes de estado, y surgió un dictador luciferino que en el nombre de Dios lleva a cabo el primer etnocidio de América Latina en nuestro tiempo. Mientras tanto 20 millones de niños latinoamericanos morían antes de cumplir dos años, que son más de cuantos han nacido en Europa occidental desde 1970. Los desaparecidos por motivos de la represión son casi los 120 mil, que es como si hoy no se supiera dónde están todos los habitantes de la ciudad de Upsala. Numerosas mujeres arrestadas encintas dieron a luz en cárceles argentinas, pero aún se ignora el paradero y la identidad de sus hijos, que fueron dados en adopción clandestina o internados en orfanatos por las autoridades militares. Por no querer que las cosas siguieran así han muerto cerca de 200 mil mujeres y hombres en todo el continente, y más de 100 mil perecieron en tres pequeños y voluntariosos países de la América Central, Nicaragua, El Salvador y Guatemala. Si esto fuera en los Estados Unidos, la cifra proporcional sería de un millón 600 mil muertes violentas en cuatro años.
De Chile, país de tradiciones hospitalarias, ha huido un millón de personas: el 10 por ciento de su población. El Uruguay, una nación minúscula de dos y medio millones de habitantes que se consideraba como el país más civilizado del continente, ha perdido en el destierro a uno de cada cinco ciudadanos. La guerra civil en El Salvador ha causado desde 1979 casi un refugiado cada 20 minutos. El país que se pudiera hacer con todos los exiliados y emigrados forzosos de América latina, tendría una población más numerosa que Noruega.
Me atrevo a pensar que es esta realidad descomunal, y no sólo su expresión literaria, la que este año ha merecido la atención de la Academia Sueca de la Letras. Una realidad que no es la del papel, sino que vive con nosotros y determina cada instante de nuestras incontables muertes cotidianas, y que sustenta un manantial de creación insaciable, pleno de desdicha y de belleza, del cual éste colombiano errante y nostálgico no es más que una cifra más señalada por la suerte. Poetas y mendigos, músicos y profetas, guerreros y malandrines, todas las criaturas de aquella realidad desaforada hemos tenido que pedirle muy poco a la imaginación, porque el desafío mayor para nosotros ha sido la insuficiencia de los recursos convencionales para hacer creíble nuestra vida. Este es, amigos, el nudo de nuestra soledad.
Pues si estas dificultades nos entorpecen a nosotros, que somos de su esencia, no es difícil entender que los talentos racionales de este lado del mundo, extasiados en la contemplación de sus propias culturas, se hayan quedado sin un método válido para interpretarnos. Es comprensible que insistan en medirnos con la misma vara con que se miden a sí mismos, sin recordar que los estragos de la vida no son iguales para todos, y que la búsqueda de la identidad propia es tan ardua y sangrienta para nosotros como lo fue para ellos. La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios. Tal vez la Europa venerable sería más comprensiva si tratara de vernos en su propio pasado. Si recordara que Londres necesitó 300 años para construir su primera muralla y otros 300 para tener un obispo, que Roma se debatió en las tinieblas de incertidumbre durante 20 siglos antes de que un rey etrusco la implantara en la historia, y que aún en el siglo XVI los pacíficos suizos de hoy, que nos deleitan con sus quesos mansos y sus relojes impávidos, ensangrentaron a Europa con soldados de fortuna. Aún en el apogeo del Renacimiento, 12 mil lansquenetes a sueldo de los ejércitos imperiales saquearon y devastaron a Roma, y pasaron a cuchillo a ocho mil de sus habitantes.
No pretendo encarnar las ilusiones de Tonio Kröger, cuyos sueños de unión entre un norte casto y un sur apasionado exaltaba Thomas Mann hace 53 años en este lugar. Pero creo que los europeos de espíritu clarificador, los que luchan también aquí por una patria grande más humana y más justa, podrían ayudarnos mejor si revisaran a fondo su manera de vernos. La solidaridad con nuestros sueños no nos haría sentir menos solos, mientras no se concrete con actos de respaldo legítimo a los pueblos que asuman la ilusión de tener una vida propia en el reparto del mundo.
América Latina no quiere ni tiene por qué ser un alfil sin albedrío, ni tiene nada de quimérico que sus designios de independencia y originalidad se conviertan en una aspiración occidental.
No obstante, los progresos de la navegación que han reducido tantas distancias entre nuestras Américas y Europa, parecen haber aumentado en cambio nuestra distancia cultural. ¿Por qué la originalidad que se nos admite sin reservas en la literatura se nos niega con toda clase de suspicacias en nuestras tentativas tan difíciles de cambio social? ¿Por qué pensar que la justicia social que los europeos de avanzada tratan de imponer en sus países no puede ser también un objetivo latinoamericano con métodos distintos en condiciones diferentes? No: la violencia y el dolor desmesurados de nuestra historia son el resultado de injusticias seculares y amarguras sin cuento, y no una confabulación urdida a 3 mil leguas de nuestra casa. Pero muchos dirigentes y pensadores europeos lo han creído, con el infantilismo de los abuelos que olvidaron las locuras fructíferas de su juventud, como si no fuera posible otro destino que vivir a merced de los dos grandes dueños del mundo. Este es, amigos, el tamaño de nuestra soledad.
Sin embargo, frente a la opresión, el saqueo y el abandono, nuestra respuesta es la vida. Ni los diluvios ni las pestes, ni las hambrunas ni los cataclismos, ni siquiera las guerras eternas a través de los siglos y los siglos han conseguido reducir la ventaja tenaz de la vida sobre la muerte. Una ventaja que aumenta y se acelera: cada año hay 74 millones más de nacimientos que de defunciones, una cantidad de vivos nuevos como para aumentar siete veces cada año la población de Nueva York. La mayoría de ellos nacen en los países con menos recursos, y entre éstos, por supuesto, los de América Latina. En cambio, los países más prósperos han logrado acumular suficiente poder de destrucción como para aniquilar cien veces no sólo a todos los seres humanos que han existido hasta hoy, sino la totalidad de los seres vivos que han pasado por este planeta de infortunios.
Un día como el de hoy, mi maestro William Faullkner dijo en este lugar: "Me niego a admitir el fin del hombre". No me sentiría digno de ocupar este sitio que fue suyo si no tuviera la conciencia plena de que por primera vez desde los orígenes de la humanidad, el desastre colosal que él se negaba a admitir hace 32 años es ahora nada más que una simple posibilidad científica. Ante esta realidad sobrecogedora que a través de todo el tiempo humano debió de parecer una utopía, los inventores de fábulas que todo lo creemos, nos sentimos con el derecho de creer que todavía no es demasiado tarde para emprender la creación de la utopía contraria. Una nueva y arrasadora utopía de la vida, donde nadie pueda decidir por otros hasta la forma de morir, donde de veras sea cierto el amor y sea posible la felicidad, y donde las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad tengan por fin y para siempre una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.
Agradezco a la Academia de Letras de Suecia el que me haya distinguido con un premio que me coloca junto a muchos de quienes orientaron y enriquecieron mis años de lector y de cotidiano celebrante de ese delirio sin apelación que es el oficio de escribir. Sus nombres y sus obras se me presentan hoy como sombras tutelares, pero también como el compromiso, a menudo agobiante, que se adquiere con este honor. Un duro honor que en ellos me pareció de simple justicia, pero que en mí entiendo como una más de esas lecciones con las que suele sorprendernos el destino, y que hacen más evidente nuestra condición de juguetes de un azar indescifrable, cuya única y desoladora recompensa, suelen ser, la mayoría de las veces, la incomprensión y el olvido.
Es por ello apenas natural que me interrogara, allá en ese trasfondo secreto en donde solemos trasegar con las verdades más esenciales que conforman nuestra identidad, cuál ha sido el sustento constante de mi obra, qué pudo haber llamado la atención de una manera tan comprometedora a este tribunal de árbitros tan severos. Confieso sin falsas modestias que no me ha sido fácil encontrar la razón, pero quiero creer que ha sido la misma que yo hubiera deseado. Quiero creer, amigos, que este es, una vez más, un homenaje que se rinde a la poesía. A la poesía por cuya virtud el inventario abrumador de las naves que numeró en su Iliada el viejo Homero está visitado por un viento que las empuja a navegar con su presteza intemporal y alucinada. La poesía que sostiene, en el delgado andamiaje de los tercetos del Dante, toda la fábrica densa y colosal de la Edad Media. La poesía que con tan milagrosa totalidad rescata a nuestra América en las Alturas de Machu Pichu de Pablo Neruda el grande, el más grande, y donde destilan su tristeza milenaria nuestros mejores sueños sin salida. La poesía, en fin, esa energía secreta de la vida cotidiana, que cuece los garbanzos en la cocina, y contagia el amor y repite las imágenes en los espejos.
En cada línea que escribo trato siempre, con mayor o menor fortuna, de invocar los espíritus esquivos de la poesía, y trato de dejar en cada palabra el testimonio de mi devoción por sus virtudes de adivinación, y por su permanente victoria contra los sordos poderes de la muerte. El premio que acabo de recibir lo entiendo, con toda humildad, como la consoladora revelación de que mi intento no ha sido en vano. Es por eso que invito a todos ustedes a brindar por lo que un gran poeta de nuestras Américas, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, ha definido como la única prueba concreta de la existencia del hombre: la poesía. Muchas gracias.
Antonio Pigafetta, un navegante florentino que acompañó a Magallanes en el primer viaje alrededor del mundo, escribió a su paso por nuestra América meridional una crónica rigurosa que sin embargo parece una aventura de la imaginación. Contó que había visto cerdos con el ombligo en el lomo, y unos pájaros sin patas cuyas hembras empollaban en las espaldas del macho, y otros como alcatraces sin lengua cuyos picos parecían una cuchara. Contó que había visto un engendro animal con cabeza y orejas de mula, cuerpo de camello, patas de ciervo y relincho de caballo. Contó que al primer nativo que encontraron en la Patagonia le pusieron enfrente un espejo, y que aquel gigante enardecido perdió el uso de la razón por el pavor de su propia imagen.
Este libro breve y fascinante, en el cual ya se vislumbran los gérmenes de nuestras novelas de hoy, no es ni mucho menos el testimonios más asombroso de nuestra realidad de aquellos tiempos. Los Cronistas de Indias nos legaron otros incontables. Eldorado, nuestro país ilusorio tan codiciado, figuró en mapas numerosos durante largos años, cambiando de lugar y de forma según la fantasía de los cartógrafos. En busca de la fuente de la Eterna Juventud, el mítico Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca exploró durante ocho años el norte de México, en una expedición venática cuyos miembros se comieron unos a otros y sólo llegaron cinco de los 600 que la emprendieron. Uno de los tantos misterios que nunca fueron descifrados, es el de las once mil mulas cargadas con cien libras de oro cada una, que un día salieron del Cuzco para pagar el rescate de Atahualpa y nunca llegaron a su destino. Más tarde, durante la colonia, se vendían en Cartagena de Indias unas gallinas criadas en tierras de aluvión, en cuyas mollejas se encontraban piedrecitas de oro. Este delirio áureo de nuestros fundadores nos persiguió hasta hace poco tiempo. Apenas en el siglo pasado la misión alemana de estudiar la construcción de un ferrocarril interoceánico en el istmo de Panamá, concluyó que el proyecto era viable con la condición de que los rieles no se hicieran de hierro, que era un metal escaso en la región, sino que se hicieran de oro.
La independencia del dominio español no nos puso a salvo de la demencia. El general Antonio López de Santana, que fue tres veces dictador de México, hizo enterrar con funerales magníficos la pierna derecha que había perdido en la llamada Guerra de los Pasteles. El general García Moreno gobernó al Ecuador durante 16 años como un monarca absoluto, y su cadáver fue velado con su uniforme de gala y su coraza de condecoraciones sentado en la silla presidencial. El general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, el déspota teósofo de El Salvador que hizo exterminar en una matanza bárbara a 30 mil campesinos, había inventado un péndulo para averiguar si los alimentos estaban envenenados, e hizo cubrir con papel rojo el alumbrado público para combatir una epidemia de escarlatina. El monumento al general Francisco Morazán, erigido en la plaza mayor de Tegucigalpa, es en realidad una estatua del mariscal Ney comprada en París en un depósito de esculturas usadas.
Hace once años, uno de los poetas insignes de nuestro tiempo, el chileno Pablo Neruda, iluminó este ámbito con su palabra. En las buenas conciencias de Europa, y a veces también en las malas, han irrumpido desde entonces con más ímpetus que nunca las noticias fantasmales de la América Latina, esa patria inmensa de hombres alucinados y mujeres históricas, cuya terquedad sin fin se confunde con la leyenda. No hemos tenido un instante de sosiego. Un presidente prometeico atrincherado en su palacio en llamas murió peleando solo contra todo un ejército, y dos desastres aéreos sospechosos y nunca esclarecidos segaron la vida de otro de corazón generoso, y la de un militar demócrata que había restaurado la dignidad de su pueblo. En este lapso ha habido 5 guerras y 17 golpes de estado, y surgió un dictador luciferino que en el nombre de Dios lleva a cabo el primer etnocidio de América Latina en nuestro tiempo. Mientras tanto 20 millones de niños latinoamericanos morían antes de cumplir dos años, que son más de cuantos han nacido en Europa occidental desde 1970. Los desaparecidos por motivos de la represión son casi los 120 mil, que es como si hoy no se supiera dónde están todos los habitantes de la ciudad de Upsala. Numerosas mujeres arrestadas encintas dieron a luz en cárceles argentinas, pero aún se ignora el paradero y la identidad de sus hijos, que fueron dados en adopción clandestina o internados en orfanatos por las autoridades militares. Por no querer que las cosas siguieran así han muerto cerca de 200 mil mujeres y hombres en todo el continente, y más de 100 mil perecieron en tres pequeños y voluntariosos países de la América Central, Nicaragua, El Salvador y Guatemala. Si esto fuera en los Estados Unidos, la cifra proporcional sería de un millón 600 mil muertes violentas en cuatro años.
De Chile, país de tradiciones hospitalarias, ha huido un millón de personas: el 10 por ciento de su población. El Uruguay, una nación minúscula de dos y medio millones de habitantes que se consideraba como el país más civilizado del continente, ha perdido en el destierro a uno de cada cinco ciudadanos. La guerra civil en El Salvador ha causado desde 1979 casi un refugiado cada 20 minutos. El país que se pudiera hacer con todos los exiliados y emigrados forzosos de América latina, tendría una población más numerosa que Noruega.
Me atrevo a pensar que es esta realidad descomunal, y no sólo su expresión literaria, la que este año ha merecido la atención de la Academia Sueca de la Letras. Una realidad que no es la del papel, sino que vive con nosotros y determina cada instante de nuestras incontables muertes cotidianas, y que sustenta un manantial de creación insaciable, pleno de desdicha y de belleza, del cual éste colombiano errante y nostálgico no es más que una cifra más señalada por la suerte. Poetas y mendigos, músicos y profetas, guerreros y malandrines, todas las criaturas de aquella realidad desaforada hemos tenido que pedirle muy poco a la imaginación, porque el desafío mayor para nosotros ha sido la insuficiencia de los recursos convencionales para hacer creíble nuestra vida. Este es, amigos, el nudo de nuestra soledad.
Pues si estas dificultades nos entorpecen a nosotros, que somos de su esencia, no es difícil entender que los talentos racionales de este lado del mundo, extasiados en la contemplación de sus propias culturas, se hayan quedado sin un método válido para interpretarnos. Es comprensible que insistan en medirnos con la misma vara con que se miden a sí mismos, sin recordar que los estragos de la vida no son iguales para todos, y que la búsqueda de la identidad propia es tan ardua y sangrienta para nosotros como lo fue para ellos. La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios. Tal vez la Europa venerable sería más comprensiva si tratara de vernos en su propio pasado. Si recordara que Londres necesitó 300 años para construir su primera muralla y otros 300 para tener un obispo, que Roma se debatió en las tinieblas de incertidumbre durante 20 siglos antes de que un rey etrusco la implantara en la historia, y que aún en el siglo XVI los pacíficos suizos de hoy, que nos deleitan con sus quesos mansos y sus relojes impávidos, ensangrentaron a Europa con soldados de fortuna. Aún en el apogeo del Renacimiento, 12 mil lansquenetes a sueldo de los ejércitos imperiales saquearon y devastaron a Roma, y pasaron a cuchillo a ocho mil de sus habitantes.
No pretendo encarnar las ilusiones de Tonio Kröger, cuyos sueños de unión entre un norte casto y un sur apasionado exaltaba Thomas Mann hace 53 años en este lugar. Pero creo que los europeos de espíritu clarificador, los que luchan también aquí por una patria grande más humana y más justa, podrían ayudarnos mejor si revisaran a fondo su manera de vernos. La solidaridad con nuestros sueños no nos haría sentir menos solos, mientras no se concrete con actos de respaldo legítimo a los pueblos que asuman la ilusión de tener una vida propia en el reparto del mundo.
América Latina no quiere ni tiene por qué ser un alfil sin albedrío, ni tiene nada de quimérico que sus designios de independencia y originalidad se conviertan en una aspiración occidental.
No obstante, los progresos de la navegación que han reducido tantas distancias entre nuestras Américas y Europa, parecen haber aumentado en cambio nuestra distancia cultural. ¿Por qué la originalidad que se nos admite sin reservas en la literatura se nos niega con toda clase de suspicacias en nuestras tentativas tan difíciles de cambio social? ¿Por qué pensar que la justicia social que los europeos de avanzada tratan de imponer en sus países no puede ser también un objetivo latinoamericano con métodos distintos en condiciones diferentes? No: la violencia y el dolor desmesurados de nuestra historia son el resultado de injusticias seculares y amarguras sin cuento, y no una confabulación urdida a 3 mil leguas de nuestra casa. Pero muchos dirigentes y pensadores europeos lo han creído, con el infantilismo de los abuelos que olvidaron las locuras fructíferas de su juventud, como si no fuera posible otro destino que vivir a merced de los dos grandes dueños del mundo. Este es, amigos, el tamaño de nuestra soledad.
Sin embargo, frente a la opresión, el saqueo y el abandono, nuestra respuesta es la vida. Ni los diluvios ni las pestes, ni las hambrunas ni los cataclismos, ni siquiera las guerras eternas a través de los siglos y los siglos han conseguido reducir la ventaja tenaz de la vida sobre la muerte. Una ventaja que aumenta y se acelera: cada año hay 74 millones más de nacimientos que de defunciones, una cantidad de vivos nuevos como para aumentar siete veces cada año la población de Nueva York. La mayoría de ellos nacen en los países con menos recursos, y entre éstos, por supuesto, los de América Latina. En cambio, los países más prósperos han logrado acumular suficiente poder de destrucción como para aniquilar cien veces no sólo a todos los seres humanos que han existido hasta hoy, sino la totalidad de los seres vivos que han pasado por este planeta de infortunios.
Un día como el de hoy, mi maestro William Faullkner dijo en este lugar: "Me niego a admitir el fin del hombre". No me sentiría digno de ocupar este sitio que fue suyo si no tuviera la conciencia plena de que por primera vez desde los orígenes de la humanidad, el desastre colosal que él se negaba a admitir hace 32 años es ahora nada más que una simple posibilidad científica. Ante esta realidad sobrecogedora que a través de todo el tiempo humano debió de parecer una utopía, los inventores de fábulas que todo lo creemos, nos sentimos con el derecho de creer que todavía no es demasiado tarde para emprender la creación de la utopía contraria. Una nueva y arrasadora utopía de la vida, donde nadie pueda decidir por otros hasta la forma de morir, donde de veras sea cierto el amor y sea posible la felicidad, y donde las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad tengan por fin y para siempre una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.
Agradezco a la Academia de Letras de Suecia el que me haya distinguido con un premio que me coloca junto a muchos de quienes orientaron y enriquecieron mis años de lector y de cotidiano celebrante de ese delirio sin apelación que es el oficio de escribir. Sus nombres y sus obras se me presentan hoy como sombras tutelares, pero también como el compromiso, a menudo agobiante, que se adquiere con este honor. Un duro honor que en ellos me pareció de simple justicia, pero que en mí entiendo como una más de esas lecciones con las que suele sorprendernos el destino, y que hacen más evidente nuestra condición de juguetes de un azar indescifrable, cuya única y desoladora recompensa, suelen ser, la mayoría de las veces, la incomprensión y el olvido.
Es por ello apenas natural que me interrogara, allá en ese trasfondo secreto en donde solemos trasegar con las verdades más esenciales que conforman nuestra identidad, cuál ha sido el sustento constante de mi obra, qué pudo haber llamado la atención de una manera tan comprometedora a este tribunal de árbitros tan severos. Confieso sin falsas modestias que no me ha sido fácil encontrar la razón, pero quiero creer que ha sido la misma que yo hubiera deseado. Quiero creer, amigos, que este es, una vez más, un homenaje que se rinde a la poesía. A la poesía por cuya virtud el inventario abrumador de las naves que numeró en su Iliada el viejo Homero está visitado por un viento que las empuja a navegar con su presteza intemporal y alucinada. La poesía que sostiene, en el delgado andamiaje de los tercetos del Dante, toda la fábrica densa y colosal de la Edad Media. La poesía que con tan milagrosa totalidad rescata a nuestra América en las Alturas de Machu Pichu de Pablo Neruda el grande, el más grande, y donde destilan su tristeza milenaria nuestros mejores sueños sin salida. La poesía, en fin, esa energía secreta de la vida cotidiana, que cuece los garbanzos en la cocina, y contagia el amor y repite las imágenes en los espejos.
En cada línea que escribo trato siempre, con mayor o menor fortuna, de invocar los espíritus esquivos de la poesía, y trato de dejar en cada palabra el testimonio de mi devoción por sus virtudes de adivinación, y por su permanente victoria contra los sordos poderes de la muerte. El premio que acabo de recibir lo entiendo, con toda humildad, como la consoladora revelación de que mi intento no ha sido en vano. Es por eso que invito a todos ustedes a brindar por lo que un gran poeta de nuestras Américas, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, ha definido como la única prueba concreta de la existencia del hombre: la poesía. Muchas gracias.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Tire Die
Tire Die, dir. Fernando Birri (Argentina)
Boca de Lixo, Fernando Coutinho (Brazil)
Por primera vez, Octavio Cortázar (Cuba)
Boca de Lixo, Fernando Coutinho (Brazil)
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Interview with the President of Ecuador
President Rafael Correa with Charlie Rose
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/ecuador-pres-rafael-correa-charlie-rose-04-15-tfCTNM8TQvq_teUtFoWkUw.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/ecuador-pres-rafael-correa-charlie-rose-04-15-tfCTNM8TQvq_teUtFoWkUw.html
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Latin American Rock
Los Shakers (Uruguay)
Sandro y los del fuego (Argentina)
Los Gatos (Argentina)
Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Cuarto Patio (Mexico)
Os mutantes (Brazil)
Pescado Rabioso, Artaud (Argentina)
Roberto Carlos (Brazil)
Cafe Tacuba, Aprovechate (México)
Monday, April 14, 2014
Thursday, April 10, 2014
http://prezi.com/xd9q-pdsckri/edit/?auth_key=wl9r568&follow=tgwbb5aukxpo
This is our group prezi but I don't know if you guys can see it.
This is our group prezi but I don't know if you guys can see it.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
http://libcom.org/files/Sitrin%20(Ed.)%20-%20Horizontalism%20-%20Voices%20of%20Popular%20Power%20in%20Argentina.pdf
This is a link to Marina Sitrin's Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Please read the first part "Translating We Walk." This helps set the general thinking needed for horizontalism.
Thank you!
This is a link to Marina Sitrin's Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Please read the first part "Translating We Walk." This helps set the general thinking needed for horizontalism.
Thank you!
This is a brief compare-contrast analysis of the two readings we read last class. Please scan over this. We went over most of this in class but there is still some concepts we didn't go in depth on. Thank you!
This is an article by John L. Hammond and it was published in the NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America)
Link: https://nacla.org/article/rise-%E2%80%98horizontalism%E2%80%99-americas
According to the two authors reviewed here, a new kind of social movement is arising in several Latin American countries. These new movements are nonhierarchical, territorially based, and autonomous—they tend to reject involvement with the state (though not absolutely); instead they propose to solve their problems of survival with their own resources.
These movements are different from traditional community or working-class movements, as well as the movements that opposed dictatorships and called for democratization in the 1980s. They have a territorial base and address the concrete problems of a particular locality in which people live and work. They reject the top-down model of organizing, which they argue has prevailed in past movements; they do not seek state power nor do they primarily seek benefits from the state. They emphasize affective bonds and personal interaction as the basis for solidarity. They reject the prevailing conception of power as domination, seeing it rather as the ability to carry out projects collectively and to develop activists’ capacities to cooperate. Beginning in the 1990s, people in marginal communities as well as people who have suffered sudden losses due to economic crisis have formed most of these movements.
Raúl Zibechi, author of Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements, is a journalist covering all of Latin America for the Uruguayan weekly Brecha. Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, is a sociologist at New York’s City University and a member of NACLA’s editorial committee. Zibechi characterizes the new movements as “movements of resistance,” Sitrin as “autonomous movements.” Zibechi highlights their opposition to the state, Sitrin their autonomy and creativity. They therefore differ in emphasis—and in the movements they examine—but there is a strong overlap.
Sitrin focuses on Argentina and presents the neighborhood assemblies, self-managed workplaces, and the piqueteros (movements of unemployed workers) that arose after the country’s economic collapse and popular uprising of December 2001. Zibechi seeks a broader compass, including all the Argentine movements of Sitrin’s account but also indigenous people in several countries, women’s social action collectives in Peru, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), and the Zapatistas in Mexico (as well as some others that are mentioned more briefly). Sitrin emphasizes the horizontal and affective relations among activists, to which Zibechi pays relatively little attention. She is more interested in portraying the movements from the inside, while he looks at their relation—or deliberate avoidance of relation—to the outside world.
The three sets of movements on which Sitrin focuses all arose or grew during the Argentine financial collapse of 2001. The collapse was due largely to a previous government’s pegging the Argentine currency to the U.S. dollar, which led to a balance-of-payments crisis. In response, the government froze bank accounts. Massive protests shouting the slogan “Que se vayan todos” (“throw them all out”) toppled governments in rapid succession: Five presidents held office in less than a month.
Sitrin accompanied these movements intermittently for a decade. She tells about marching with them and joining in their occupations. Middle-class people, those most directly affected by the bank closures—because they had bank accounts—formed neighborhood assemblies and flooded the streets in cacerolazos, demonstrations accompanied by the loud banging of pots and pans. Unemployed workers in more marginal areas formed the piqueteros—the name comes from their picket lines that closed roadways to demand unemployment subsidies that would be managed by the associations of the unemployed themselves. As capitalists dismissed workers or abandoned their firms because of the crisis, workers asserted authority over those workplaces and began to run them themselves.
In all of these sites, the new activists created horizontal forms of organization, rejecting the hierarchical leadership of earlier movements that had failed to respond to the crisis adequately. In horizontal organizations, people developed what Sitrin calls affective politics, a political practice of deepening human relationships and respect for individuals, rejecting strategic manipulation. She includes dynamic descriptions and extensive quotes from those who experienced the movements’ solidarity and problem solving through bonds of mutual respect and affection. Close personal relations, she argues, sustained people in the movements and motivated them to work on their collective projects.
But the three types of organization were different, depending largely on whether they had concrete tasks to perform. The workplaces had to organize to produce and sell their products or serve their customers, as well as to fight off the repression that the state brought down on them, complying with the demands of the ousted owners. The piqueteros’ organizations in poor neighborhoods on the periphery of Buenos Aires and other cities, though they fought for unemployment subsidies, mainly organized mutual self-help to allow people to survive on their own resources. The neighborhood assemblies had less reason to exist once the immediate financial crisis was past and bank accounts were unfrozen; traditional political parties often intervened in the assemblies that survived, and partisan strife hampered their functioning.
Sitrin’s ethnographic account includes many testimonies of participants in the movements, describing not only how the organizations worked but also the transformation that participation has brought about in activists’ lives. As a woman in a local movement of unemployed workers put it, “We . . . started to love each other as neighbors. We discovered that we were a lot happier when we were confronting the crisis together.”
Sitrin is attentive to the way language is transformed as well. Many words took on new meanings. Autonomy, for example: At first it had the mainly negative connotation of freedom from control by the external forces of government and parties, but it came to be something positive: an “active form of being”, a creation of something new rather than just a response to an external power.
Zibechi, in essays that were originally published separately, not only has a broader geographic reach, but offers a more structural account of what he refers to as movements of resistance, both of their origin and of their current relations to the larger society. He regards the new movements as a response to neoliberalism. Older movements that had represented the working class, most notably trade unions, were decimated by neoliberalism in the waning years of the last century. Most of the movements he discusses are based not in workplaces but in communities and are concerned with identity and everyday life.
He pays little attention to horizontality and affective relations in these movements. For him, their most distinctive feature is their territoriality. They exist on the margins of society, spatially as well as socially, where they are beyond the reach of the powerful. They can therefore resist subjection to the dominant institutions of society, including the state, and organize their own institutions. The workplaces he discusses have all come under worker control, usually after a struggle to oust owners or to pick up the pieces after owners had abandoned them.
Where Sitrin strongly emphasizes the language with which activists express their experiences, Zibechi emphasizes their epistemology. In their relative isolation, activists control knowledge-based activity and reject the beliefs imposed by colonizers. The knowledge they transmit in community-controlled schools (in the Bolivian Andes and in the Brazilian MST settlements) or in providing medical care (in Chiapas and the piqueteros’ communities) is derived from their received traditions. In the schools they can teach their own culture, not the ruling ideology propagated in official schools, which belittle that culture. In health care they take advantage of modern medicine, but selectively. The movements that can do this most effectively are those that control territory. Overall, his argument fits movements that are more physically separate, hence more autonomous, than the other movements.
In his concluding section, Zibechi deals with these movements’ relation to the new progressive governments that have won elections in many Latin American countries in this century. The governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, and the new governments in Bolivia and Ecuador, he says, have not really broken with neoliberalism; instead, despite programs to alleviate the worst of the poverty left by the preceding neoliberal decade, they have followed the same neoliberal prescription promoting the free market, resource extraction, and economic growth for its own sake. He draws on Foucault’s concept of bio-political power: The state represses movements while incorporating the poor through social benefits (in the Southern Cone) or community action (in the Andean countries), and reinforces its position vis-à-vis the movements by seducing their leaders with government offices. He is hardly friendlier to the more radical governments of Bolivia and Ecuador than to the center-left Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan governments. (His treatment of Venezuela is less harsh.)
These governments offer inducements to co-opt social movements, he says, and traditional movements have succumbed. The movements of resistance have maintained their autonomy more successfully. While their territorial base can protect them from repression, Zibechi argues, governments work hard to co-opt them. In general, however, the movements’ isolation protects them from co-optation.
These two books differ in their coverage, and partly for that reason they also differ in their emphases. Together, however, they give us a portrait of a new kind of movement of the last decade or more whose activism is a welcome antidote to the quiescence and incorporation of many of the more traditional urban and class-based movements. Neither book gives a full-scale analysis either of the neoliberalism or of the allegedly post-neoliberal governments. Though the authors show that those governments have repressed social movements, they do not clearly explain why—except that Zibechi seems to assume that states are necessarily repressive.
Recognizing the danger of co-optation, both authors insist that the movements must guard their autonomy jealously. Some readers will be skeptical about both the movements’ staying power and about their ability to achieve the desired social transformations without using the tools of the state. Sitrin talks explicitly about staying power. As she acknowledges, many participants have dropped out and some movements have opted for accepting state benefits even at the cost of autonomy. She nevertheless declares the movements successful at fostering caring, cooperative relations and achieving their goals. She insists that their success must be measured by the testimony of the activists themselves—not by a numbers game counting those who have remained active and dedicated to horizontality and autonomy in comparison to the number who have dropped out or compromised with the state. If the experience of participants is the measure of success, however, then the experience of those who responded differently should also be accounted for.
Both authors count these movements’ autonomy from the state as their greatest strength. But their own evidence shows that the movements thoroughly imbricate themselves with the state even as they attempt to escape its strictures. And in the end, both authors qualify their claims and show that instead of complete separation, the movements are working out a more complex relation with the state that, they say, maintains a critical stance and avoids being taken over.
In Zibechi’s case the discrepancy arises in part because the essays in the book were written separately: He offers broad generalizations in early chapters claiming that the movements he has studied “not only [reject] the state form, but [they acquire] a non-state form”; later in the book, however, he presents details about particular movements that make them appear considerably less autonomous. The Brazilian MST, for example, while clearly a movement of opposition, relies heavily on the country’s agrarian reform bureaucracy for legitimization of its possession of occupied land and for support in the form of agricultural credit and technical assistance.
Sitrin, in her concluding chapters, argues that over time the movements developed a more sophisticated analysis of the state and learned to engage with it without making it the point of reference. Both authors’ claims of autonomy, however, are highly qualified by descriptions of the actual practice.
On the whole, these two books provide us with graphic pictures of a new kind of movement that maintains a critical stance toward the state while living within it. They show what resources make that stance possible. A similar movement has arisen in the United States since 2011: Occupy Wall Street and its extensions across the country have generally adopted the horizontal, leaderless style of organization. The occupation of territory, even if only for a short period, has given them an identity and a platform for asserting, at least rhetorically, their refusal to join in state-oriented politics. Sitrin herself has been an active participant and mentor to the movement in New York. The movements discussed in these books, despite the considerable differences between their social/political environments and our own, offer examples to inform us about the possibilities open to movements for social transformation in the United States as well.
Series of Videos from Al Jazeera about Brukman, garment factory that was taken over by workers
https://archive.org/details/LINKTV_20131027_210000_Al_Jazeera_World_News#start/120/end/180
This is an article by John L. Hammond and it was published in the NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America)
Link: https://nacla.org/article/rise-%E2%80%98horizontalism%E2%80%99-americas
According to the two authors reviewed here, a new kind of social movement is arising in several Latin American countries. These new movements are nonhierarchical, territorially based, and autonomous—they tend to reject involvement with the state (though not absolutely); instead they propose to solve their problems of survival with their own resources.
These movements are different from traditional community or working-class movements, as well as the movements that opposed dictatorships and called for democratization in the 1980s. They have a territorial base and address the concrete problems of a particular locality in which people live and work. They reject the top-down model of organizing, which they argue has prevailed in past movements; they do not seek state power nor do they primarily seek benefits from the state. They emphasize affective bonds and personal interaction as the basis for solidarity. They reject the prevailing conception of power as domination, seeing it rather as the ability to carry out projects collectively and to develop activists’ capacities to cooperate. Beginning in the 1990s, people in marginal communities as well as people who have suffered sudden losses due to economic crisis have formed most of these movements.
Raúl Zibechi, author of Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements, is a journalist covering all of Latin America for the Uruguayan weekly Brecha. Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, is a sociologist at New York’s City University and a member of NACLA’s editorial committee. Zibechi characterizes the new movements as “movements of resistance,” Sitrin as “autonomous movements.” Zibechi highlights their opposition to the state, Sitrin their autonomy and creativity. They therefore differ in emphasis—and in the movements they examine—but there is a strong overlap.
Sitrin focuses on Argentina and presents the neighborhood assemblies, self-managed workplaces, and the piqueteros (movements of unemployed workers) that arose after the country’s economic collapse and popular uprising of December 2001. Zibechi seeks a broader compass, including all the Argentine movements of Sitrin’s account but also indigenous people in several countries, women’s social action collectives in Peru, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), and the Zapatistas in Mexico (as well as some others that are mentioned more briefly). Sitrin emphasizes the horizontal and affective relations among activists, to which Zibechi pays relatively little attention. She is more interested in portraying the movements from the inside, while he looks at their relation—or deliberate avoidance of relation—to the outside world.
The three sets of movements on which Sitrin focuses all arose or grew during the Argentine financial collapse of 2001. The collapse was due largely to a previous government’s pegging the Argentine currency to the U.S. dollar, which led to a balance-of-payments crisis. In response, the government froze bank accounts. Massive protests shouting the slogan “Que se vayan todos” (“throw them all out”) toppled governments in rapid succession: Five presidents held office in less than a month.
Sitrin accompanied these movements intermittently for a decade. She tells about marching with them and joining in their occupations. Middle-class people, those most directly affected by the bank closures—because they had bank accounts—formed neighborhood assemblies and flooded the streets in cacerolazos, demonstrations accompanied by the loud banging of pots and pans. Unemployed workers in more marginal areas formed the piqueteros—the name comes from their picket lines that closed roadways to demand unemployment subsidies that would be managed by the associations of the unemployed themselves. As capitalists dismissed workers or abandoned their firms because of the crisis, workers asserted authority over those workplaces and began to run them themselves.
In all of these sites, the new activists created horizontal forms of organization, rejecting the hierarchical leadership of earlier movements that had failed to respond to the crisis adequately. In horizontal organizations, people developed what Sitrin calls affective politics, a political practice of deepening human relationships and respect for individuals, rejecting strategic manipulation. She includes dynamic descriptions and extensive quotes from those who experienced the movements’ solidarity and problem solving through bonds of mutual respect and affection. Close personal relations, she argues, sustained people in the movements and motivated them to work on their collective projects.
But the three types of organization were different, depending largely on whether they had concrete tasks to perform. The workplaces had to organize to produce and sell their products or serve their customers, as well as to fight off the repression that the state brought down on them, complying with the demands of the ousted owners. The piqueteros’ organizations in poor neighborhoods on the periphery of Buenos Aires and other cities, though they fought for unemployment subsidies, mainly organized mutual self-help to allow people to survive on their own resources. The neighborhood assemblies had less reason to exist once the immediate financial crisis was past and bank accounts were unfrozen; traditional political parties often intervened in the assemblies that survived, and partisan strife hampered their functioning.
Sitrin’s ethnographic account includes many testimonies of participants in the movements, describing not only how the organizations worked but also the transformation that participation has brought about in activists’ lives. As a woman in a local movement of unemployed workers put it, “We . . . started to love each other as neighbors. We discovered that we were a lot happier when we were confronting the crisis together.”
Sitrin is attentive to the way language is transformed as well. Many words took on new meanings. Autonomy, for example: At first it had the mainly negative connotation of freedom from control by the external forces of government and parties, but it came to be something positive: an “active form of being”, a creation of something new rather than just a response to an external power.
Zibechi, in essays that were originally published separately, not only has a broader geographic reach, but offers a more structural account of what he refers to as movements of resistance, both of their origin and of their current relations to the larger society. He regards the new movements as a response to neoliberalism. Older movements that had represented the working class, most notably trade unions, were decimated by neoliberalism in the waning years of the last century. Most of the movements he discusses are based not in workplaces but in communities and are concerned with identity and everyday life.
He pays little attention to horizontality and affective relations in these movements. For him, their most distinctive feature is their territoriality. They exist on the margins of society, spatially as well as socially, where they are beyond the reach of the powerful. They can therefore resist subjection to the dominant institutions of society, including the state, and organize their own institutions. The workplaces he discusses have all come under worker control, usually after a struggle to oust owners or to pick up the pieces after owners had abandoned them.
Where Sitrin strongly emphasizes the language with which activists express their experiences, Zibechi emphasizes their epistemology. In their relative isolation, activists control knowledge-based activity and reject the beliefs imposed by colonizers. The knowledge they transmit in community-controlled schools (in the Bolivian Andes and in the Brazilian MST settlements) or in providing medical care (in Chiapas and the piqueteros’ communities) is derived from their received traditions. In the schools they can teach their own culture, not the ruling ideology propagated in official schools, which belittle that culture. In health care they take advantage of modern medicine, but selectively. The movements that can do this most effectively are those that control territory. Overall, his argument fits movements that are more physically separate, hence more autonomous, than the other movements.
In his concluding section, Zibechi deals with these movements’ relation to the new progressive governments that have won elections in many Latin American countries in this century. The governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, and the new governments in Bolivia and Ecuador, he says, have not really broken with neoliberalism; instead, despite programs to alleviate the worst of the poverty left by the preceding neoliberal decade, they have followed the same neoliberal prescription promoting the free market, resource extraction, and economic growth for its own sake. He draws on Foucault’s concept of bio-political power: The state represses movements while incorporating the poor through social benefits (in the Southern Cone) or community action (in the Andean countries), and reinforces its position vis-à-vis the movements by seducing their leaders with government offices. He is hardly friendlier to the more radical governments of Bolivia and Ecuador than to the center-left Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan governments. (His treatment of Venezuela is less harsh.)
These governments offer inducements to co-opt social movements, he says, and traditional movements have succumbed. The movements of resistance have maintained their autonomy more successfully. While their territorial base can protect them from repression, Zibechi argues, governments work hard to co-opt them. In general, however, the movements’ isolation protects them from co-optation.
These two books differ in their coverage, and partly for that reason they also differ in their emphases. Together, however, they give us a portrait of a new kind of movement of the last decade or more whose activism is a welcome antidote to the quiescence and incorporation of many of the more traditional urban and class-based movements. Neither book gives a full-scale analysis either of the neoliberalism or of the allegedly post-neoliberal governments. Though the authors show that those governments have repressed social movements, they do not clearly explain why—except that Zibechi seems to assume that states are necessarily repressive.
Recognizing the danger of co-optation, both authors insist that the movements must guard their autonomy jealously. Some readers will be skeptical about both the movements’ staying power and about their ability to achieve the desired social transformations without using the tools of the state. Sitrin talks explicitly about staying power. As she acknowledges, many participants have dropped out and some movements have opted for accepting state benefits even at the cost of autonomy. She nevertheless declares the movements successful at fostering caring, cooperative relations and achieving their goals. She insists that their success must be measured by the testimony of the activists themselves—not by a numbers game counting those who have remained active and dedicated to horizontality and autonomy in comparison to the number who have dropped out or compromised with the state. If the experience of participants is the measure of success, however, then the experience of those who responded differently should also be accounted for.
Both authors count these movements’ autonomy from the state as their greatest strength. But their own evidence shows that the movements thoroughly imbricate themselves with the state even as they attempt to escape its strictures. And in the end, both authors qualify their claims and show that instead of complete separation, the movements are working out a more complex relation with the state that, they say, maintains a critical stance and avoids being taken over.
In Zibechi’s case the discrepancy arises in part because the essays in the book were written separately: He offers broad generalizations in early chapters claiming that the movements he has studied “not only [reject] the state form, but [they acquire] a non-state form”; later in the book, however, he presents details about particular movements that make them appear considerably less autonomous. The Brazilian MST, for example, while clearly a movement of opposition, relies heavily on the country’s agrarian reform bureaucracy for legitimization of its possession of occupied land and for support in the form of agricultural credit and technical assistance.
Sitrin, in her concluding chapters, argues that over time the movements developed a more sophisticated analysis of the state and learned to engage with it without making it the point of reference. Both authors’ claims of autonomy, however, are highly qualified by descriptions of the actual practice.
On the whole, these two books provide us with graphic pictures of a new kind of movement that maintains a critical stance toward the state while living within it. They show what resources make that stance possible. A similar movement has arisen in the United States since 2011: Occupy Wall Street and its extensions across the country have generally adopted the horizontal, leaderless style of organization. The occupation of territory, even if only for a short period, has given them an identity and a platform for asserting, at least rhetorically, their refusal to join in state-oriented politics. Sitrin herself has been an active participant and mentor to the movement in New York. The movements discussed in these books, despite the considerable differences between their social/political environments and our own, offer examples to inform us about the possibilities open to movements for social transformation in the United States as well.
Series of Videos from Al Jazeera about Brukman, garment factory that was taken over by workers
https://archive.org/details/LINKTV_20131027_210000_Al_Jazeera_World_News#start/120/end/180
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Friday, April 4, 2014
The Economy and Latin America
Bello
The going gets tougher
Sustaining recent social progress may require a squeeze on the richMar 1st 2014 | From the print edition
FOR Latin Americans, the past dozen years have been remarkable. The region has seen a magical combination of faster economic growth, falling poverty and declining income inequality. Is this unprecedented period of progress over?
Growth has certainly slowed, to below 3% in the past two years compared with an annual average of 5% in 2003-08. But poverty continues to fall. In a report* released this week, the World Bank reckons that in 2012 only a quarter of Latin Americans were “poor”, a category defined as those living on less than $4 a day at purchasing-power parity (see chart). The largest social group in the region is made up of those whom the bank defines as “vulnerable” to sinking back into poverty. But they are set to be surpassed in size by the middle class sometime in the next three years. That is significant, not least because the bank uses a more realistic definition of the middle class (a daily income of $10-50) than those often bandied about in the region.
In this section
Towards the brink
Shackling Shorty
Unarmed and dangerous
The going gets tougher
Reprints
Related topics
Economic Inequality
Business
Economics
Economic development
Venezuela
As growth slows, however, so will the pace of the fall in poverty. The bank expects the annual decline in the number of poor to have dropped to only 0.8 percentage points since 2012, from 1.8 points in 2003-12. It also thinks the fall in income inequality has come to an end. The region’s Gini coefficient—a standard measure where zero means that income is equally shared and one means one person takes it all—fell from 0.57 in 2000 to 0.52 in 2010, but the bank reckons it has more or less been stuck there since. This still leaves Latin America as the world’s most unequal region, along with sub-Saharan Africa.
That assessment may be a bit pessimistic. The bank pools data from 17 countries in the region to come up with averages (it excludes Venezuela, whose statistics are not verifiable by outsiders). Nora Lustig, an economist at Tulane University in New Orleans, has crunched the household-survey numbers for individual countries. She thinks the fall in income inequality is continuing in many countries, and has accelerated in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador—though not in Mexico, where it seems to have reversed in 2010. But she, too, thinks there is a risk of the fall in inequality petering out.
Government cash-transfer programmes to the poor, and demographic changes—a smaller proportion of dependents and more women going out to work—have played a role in reducing inequality. But the big change has been in wages: unlike in many developed countries, differentials between higher and lower earners have fallen in Latin America. The expansion in education, especially secondary schooling, has reduced the premium this previously attracted in the labour market. In some countries big rises in the minimum wage have also helped.
Such gains may have largely run their course. The poor quality of the region’s public schools risks holding back the expansion of higher education (together with slow economic growth, that seems to be the problem in Mexico, says Ms Lustig). Growing fiscal constraints and competitiveness problems mean the scope for rises in the minimum wage is limited.
So what can governments do to keep progress going? The most important answer is to undertake the structural reforms required to boost economic growth as the commodity boom wanes: 70% of the fall in poverty in 2003-12 was due to a rise in incomes from employment, not from social programmes, according to the bank. This message will be reinforced by a likely rise in poverty in Venezuela and Argentina, whose economies are suffering stagflation after years of handouts.
Keeping the fall in inequality going will require a crusade to improve the quality of education—which is easier said than done. Many governments need to spend more on health and education, especially for brown, black and rural Latin Americans, whose opportunities continue to lag behind. That means raising taxes (see page 80). But since most countries rely excessively on consumption taxes, this in turn risks aggravating inequality rather than reducing it.
Data on income from capital are skimpy. But because taxes on property, inheritance and capital gains are all low to non-existent, it is clear that, compared with their peers elsewhere and their salaried fellow-countrymen, rich Latin Americans pay less than their fair share of taxes. Keeping the fall in poverty and inequality going may require a squeeze on the rich—but done cleverly, so as not to deter growth-enhancing investments.
* “Social Gains in the Balance: A Fiscal Policy Challenge for Latin America and the Caribbean”, February 2014
From the print edition: The Americas
Thursday, April 3, 2014
RESEARCH TOOLS
Handbook of Latin American Studies
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/titles.php?id=168
Journal of Latin American Studies (with full text from 1997 to present, electronically from Cambridge Press:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/titles.php?id=168
Journal of Latin American Studies (with full text from 1997 to present, electronically from Cambridge Press:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=LAS
You can search within the journal using the ProQuest software here:
http://search.proquest.com/publication/48667
Also available from the Ikeda Library: Hispanic American Historical Review http://hahr.dukejournals.org/, (with electronic coverage from 2000 to present in full text)
Also available from the Ikeda Library: Hispanic American Historical Review http://hahr.dukejournals.org/, (with electronic coverage from 2000 to present in full text)
You can use the Academic Search Premier software to search the contents here:
Revolution, revolutionaries groups and social movements
CONAIE
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)
http://conaie.nativeweb.org/
Zapatista Related Websites
http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/
Writings of Sub-commander Marcos
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/marcos_index.html
Zapatista Related Websites
http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/
Writings of Sub-commander Marcos
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/marcos_index.html
A PLACE CALLED CHIAPAS, dir. Nettie Wild (1998)
REVOLUTION AND REVOLUTIONARIES GROUP Silvio Rodriguez on the Special Period (1990's)
DISILLUSIONMENT
Like coins
Disillusionment jingles its theme
Disillusionment.
With a red mouth
And big droopy breasts
Disillusionment
Smoking light tobacco
And exhaling alcohol
The owner of the bed embroidered
In underwear.
What frenzy in interrogation
What suicide in investigating
A brilliant fashion show
Disillusionment.
Like coins
Disillusionment jingles its theme
Disillusionment.
With a red mouth
And big droopy breasts
Disillusionment
Smoking light tobacco
And exhaling alcohol
The owner of the bed embroidered
In underwear.
What frenzy in interrogation
What suicide in investigating
A brilliant fashion show
Disillusionment.
It opened a business
Reviving leisure
Disillusionment.
Like tourism
It invented the abyss
Disillusionment
It touched the diamond
And turned it to coal
And it planted a good-for-nothing
In the administration.
THE FOOL
To keep my icon from being smashed,
To save myself among the few and the odd ones,
To grant me a space in their Parnassus,
To give me a little corner in their altars,
they come to invite me to repent,
they come to invite me not to lose out,
they come to invite me to undefine myself,
they come to invite me to so much bullshit.
I can't say what the future is,
I've always been what I've been
Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
I want to keep on betting on the lost cause,
I want to be with the left hand rather than right,
I want to make a Congress of the united,
I want to pray deeply an "our son ."
They'll say that craziness has gone out of fashion, They 'll say that people are evil and don't
deserve it, but I'll leave with my mischievous dreams
(perhaps multiplying bread and fish).
Reviving leisure
Disillusionment.
Like tourism
It invented the abyss
Disillusionment
It touched the diamond
And turned it to coal
And it planted a good-for-nothing
In the administration.
THE FOOL
To keep my icon from being smashed,
To save myself among the few and the odd ones,
To grant me a space in their Parnassus,
To give me a little corner in their altars,
they come to invite me to repent,
they come to invite me not to lose out,
they come to invite me to undefine myself,
they come to invite me to so much bullshit.
I can't say what the future is,
I've always been what I've been
Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
I want to keep on betting on the lost cause,
I want to be with the left hand rather than right,
I want to make a Congress of the united,
I want to pray deeply an "our son ."
They'll say that craziness has gone out of fashion, They 'll say that people are evil and don't
deserve it, but I'll leave with my mischievous dreams
(perhaps multiplying bread and fish).
I can't say what the future is, I've always been what I've been, Only God, up there, is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
They say that I'll be dragged over the rocks when the Revolution comes crashing down, that they'll
smash my hands and my mouth, that they'll tear out my eyes and my tongue.
It may well be that I'm the child of foolishness, the foolishness of what today seems foolish: the
foolishness of accepting one's enemy,
the foolishness of living without a price.
I can't say what the future is, I've always been what I've been, Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
THE FIFTIES CLUB
1arrive at the club of the fifty-year-olds (1950s)
and one hand brings the bill
The sum (addition) calls my attention from back to my cradle
Every fire, every underta king [with the implication of something you really
want to do]
I will die just as I've lived.
They say that I'll be dragged over the rocks when the Revolution comes crashing down, that they'll
smash my hands and my mouth, that they'll tear out my eyes and my tongue.
It may well be that I'm the child of foolishness, the foolishness of what today seems foolish: the
foolishness of accepting one's enemy,
the foolishness of living without a price.
I can't say what the future is, I've always been what I've been, Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
THE FIFTIES CLUB
1arrive at the club of the fifty-year-olds (1950s)
and one hand brings the bill
The sum (addition) calls my attention from back to my cradle
Every fire, every underta king [with the implication of something you really
want to do]
comes with a price tag next to it
in spite of what has been paid .
I wonder what kind of business this is
in which even desire becomes an object of consumption
what will I do when the sun sends its bill?
in spite of what has been paid .
I wonder what kind of business this is
in which even desire becomes an object of consumption
what will I do when the sun sends its bill?
But I keep turning my face to the east
and order another breakfast [using an Anglicism; that is, the word order isn't
really used like that in Spanish]
in spite of the cost of love.
Let debts and inflation come,
rous, fines, recessions.
Let the pickpocket try to grab
the taste of my bolero.
Whoever the boss may be
Let him charge me diligently
(that cruel hand will find out
when I send him my bill).
FLOWERS
The night flowers of Fifth Avenue open
For those poor gentlemen who go to the hotel
Flowers that break in the darkness
Flowers of winks of complicity
Flowers whistling suicides
Flowers with a fatal aroma
What gardener has sown our Fifth Avenue
With such a precise nocturnal variety
What is their species, what is their country
What fancy fertilizer nourished their root
Giving them a wild tone
Where could their womb be?
Flowers that go through forbidden doors
Flowers that know what I'll never know
Flowers that string their dream of life
In garlands without faith
Flowers of sheets with eyes
Disposable flowers
Doorbells of desire
Flowers eating the leftovers of love
They sprout, they bounce, they explode on our Fifth Avenue
They are pulled up and depart with swift air
They say that a flower's job is hard
When its petals wither in the sun
Pale nocturnal flowers
Flowers of disillusionment.
TRANSLATBD BY AVIVA CHOMSKY
and order another breakfast [using an Anglicism; that is, the word order isn't
really used like that in Spanish]
in spite of the cost of love.
Let debts and inflation come,
rous, fines, recessions.
Let the pickpocket try to grab
the taste of my bolero.
Whoever the boss may be
Let him charge me diligently
(that cruel hand will find out
when I send him my bill).
FLOWERS
The night flowers of Fifth Avenue open
For those poor gentlemen who go to the hotel
Flowers that break in the darkness
Flowers of winks of complicity
Flowers whistling suicides
Flowers with a fatal aroma
What gardener has sown our Fifth Avenue
With such a precise nocturnal variety
What is their species, what is their country
What fancy fertilizer nourished their root
Giving them a wild tone
Where could their womb be?
Flowers that go through forbidden doors
Flowers that know what I'll never know
Flowers that string their dream of life
In garlands without faith
Flowers of sheets with eyes
Disposable flowers
Doorbells of desire
Flowers eating the leftovers of love
They sprout, they bounce, they explode on our Fifth Avenue
They are pulled up and depart with swift air
They say that a flower's job is hard
When its petals wither in the sun
Pale nocturnal flowers
Flowers of disillusionment.
TRANSLATBD BY AVIVA CHOMSKY
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